Broken (PidgeXLance)
by KyouKen0
Summary: Pidge has two goals in life- to survive and to find her brother. But Pidge is tired, and travels are long, and she is alone. - In which Pidge is basically a globe-trotter, it's an apocalypse, and Pidge is bad ass.
1. Pilot

Pidge conducts her last raid of the day just as the sun begins to lower behind the trees. With a pack full of supplies and not a weapon in her arms, she uses the last hour or two of day light to set up her home for the night.

She takes shelter behind the counter of a goods store, a tattered blanket around her shoulders with be back pressed against the counter, an expired can of peaches in her hands. She pops it open using the pull tab and digs in with her fingers, the sweet of the peaches coating her tongue.

It's been her first meal in a while.

She kills half of the can and decides to save the rest for breakfast in the morning, the first she's managed to have in the past couple of days. The sun has yet to go down entirely, so Pidge decides to wonder the shelves of the good store using the darkening light from the sun.

The counter sports an assortment of knifes. She needs a weapon desperately - she can't travel as far without one, and has resorted to taking shelter in abandoned homes and starving due to her inability to stay moving.

She looks around, knowing that the store will have an alarm system. If she breaks the glass, she sets of the alarm, which will certainly spell out her demise. If she can find the keys, however, she could easily unlock the assortment and take what she needs.

She sighs, turns on her heel, and decides to search around the rest of the store.

She manages a good haul, deciding that maybe she should have came here first instead of raiding the home a block or so down. But she had been losing daylight, and with winder approaching, it seemed to disappear so much more quickly.

Pidge gains a couple bars of old chocolate, a jar of peanut butter, a single sleeve of crackers, and an entire case of water. She manages to find a couple of t-shirts, changing into a pale blue one very quickly. It smells of dust, yet she decides that is better then the smell of her own sweat. The shirt is tighter than what she would like, but it's clean, fresher than anything she has worn since everything went to shit.

She isn't sure how long she sits there behind the counter, licking peanut butter of of spoon and sipping water consistently to help get her strength back up, but when she finally finishes the bottle of water and a quarter of the jar, the sun has gone down completely and the goods store is completely pitch black.

She screws that lid back on her jar of peanut butter and settles down, unknowing to how late it is, she wraps a thin blanket around her shoulders and begins to doze off against the counter, feeling more comfterable than she has in weeks.

When she sleeps, in the shelter of the goods store, it's the first full night of sleep she gets without a nightmare in weeks.

xx

When Pidge finally awakes, the sun is shining through the windows of the goods store. It's around noon, and Pidge is surprised that she managed to sleep that long.

In the past weeks, she's never been able to get a full night of sleep, let alone anything extra. Although her sleeping till noon has taken away some much needed time for traveling, she feels more rested than she ever has and she doesn't regret it.

For lunch, or breakfast in her case, she eats the rest of the canned peaches, drinks another full bottle of water, and eats a couple of squares of chocolate. After eating, she decides to spend another day in the goods store, because she can't carry a case of 20 water bottles with her, and she, admittedly, doesn't mind another day of rest.

For the rest of the day, she noredly plays with a couple of cheap dollar toys that the store offers, and she drinks water constantly. After barely drinking anything, it's refreshing, and for the first time one forever her urine is no longer a dark yellow. Her body must be loving her at the moment.

She takes a good hour to reorganize her supplies in her pack. She makes used a notepad and a nearly dried up pen to make a list of everything she has, and she double checks it six different times before she's positive she has absolutely everything she needs.

•bottles of water

•a half jar of peanut butter

• chocolate

•crackers

• two cans of peaches

•Can of beans

•shirts

•gloves

•a scarf

•blanket

•six bullets (No gun)

•tampons

•notepad

•matches

Her list is smaller than she would wish, but it's honestly all she can fit in the pack. It's dinner time when she finishes, and she eats half of her sleeve of crackers and another quarter of her jar of peanut butter. She sips some more water, and then spends half an hour arranging her pack around. She manages to squeeze a fifth bottle of water in it after a lot of effort, and in the morning she decides she'll carry another bottle with her as she walks tomorrow.

After that, she walks around the goods store for good measure, and finds that she has no threats to worry about at the moment, and the sun is still high in the sky when she finds she has nothing else to really do.

"I need to find those keys," Pidge says to herself, and she looks around the shop to distract her from getting bored. After a few hours of searching, she doesn't find the keys to the weapon arrangement.

Slightly defeated, and with the sun going down again, she settles and gets an early start to the night so she knows she'll wake up early in the morning.

She sleeps soundly again, with not a single nightmare to stir her.

xx

When Pidge begins her walk, her pack his heavy on her shoulders. She doesn't really have a destination in mind, she just walks in the same direction hoping to find something useful. She sips from the extra water bottle as she does, the sun blazing on the back of her neck. She walks at an even pace, no where near needing to rest, and uses the energy she's acquired in the goods store to good use.

It's cooler than it was yesterday, and winter is approaching fast. She doesn't exactly know what day or month it is, but since winter is started to begin, she assumes it's close to December. She stopped counting the days when they started to blur together, and days stopped being days, they where only separated by when the sun would rise and when it would set.

Pidge is walking through an abandoned neighborhood in, quite literally, the middle of absolutely no where. She has no idea where she's traveled at this point, she only knows that her brother had to have went this direction.

Her instincts tell her that, and Pidge trusts her instincts. They've gotten her this far, and she knows she can't go back to not relying on them. The neighborhood eventually fades into small buildings as she walks more distance, and she moves on to the next neighborhood.

As she walks, she thinks of her brother. Getting separated was never what she had wanted, but it had been inevitable - Matt had already been hours away with his wife and Pidge has been stuck at home, going to college and working some bullshit side job.

Matt had been trying to travel back home when it all went down, when the quarantines started around the globe. Something had went disastrously wrong and no one could pinpoint what exactly had gone wrong. No one knew, and a couple weeks in, the quarantine rules stopped applying and the news stopped airing. Water stopped operating and electricity failed, and then the need for survival began.

Matt was hours, days even, away, and Pidge was moving on foot.

And her parents had been taken from day one, from their jobs, to quarantine, and yet not a single government officially had come to take her from home.

She assumed that things had gotten so bad in only a couple of days that no one could get her. And then she was alone and she needed to survive and she knew absolutely nothing about survival.

Pidge had made it work, though, and her she was, traveling for weeks. She was hours, days from home, and it had been a couple of months since the quarintine had failed.

She stops walking when she comes to a large farm home. It's dangerous, risky, but the large horse grazing in the fence shows her that it's safe. She approaches it, and instead of being startled it greets her directly, letting her hand brush against it's large nose.

"Hey, girl, " she nearly coos, her body almost shaking with excitement at the fact that she's found something alive. "I think I'll stay with you, how about that?"

The brown horse snorts her response, her huge nostrils flaring. Pidge doesn't try to sleep in the house that night, and she sleeps in a rusty, paint-peeling barn, the horse having followed her.

That night, she sleeps in a barn that smells of old hay and stale manure.

When she awakes, she doesn't expect to have a knife pressed against her throat and a pair of stern eyes staring her down.

And... does this guy have a mullet?

xxx

 _ **Oh gosh. I had this idea on a whim, and the ship was something new I have recently discovered and I love it (?????).**_ _ **In this, time is a little warped and it's shaky. I'd say that once the outbreak started, quarantine efforts started within a week of it beginning. The quarantine began failing literally a few days after, and Pidge was on her own since. It's been about half (?) A year since then, so Pidge has been along for about 6 or 7 months. Pidge is also aged up considerably, she's around 18 or so, but that's shaky as well.**_ _ **\--**_


	2. Continuum

Staring up at the man who holds the end of his knife at her throat, Pidge feels a moments panic.

 _He wouldn't kill me, would he? He looks young. My age, maybe?_

"Good morning," Pidge says, the end of the knife easing ever so slightly off of her throat. She can feel the blood that had welled up at the knives tip, though the pressure of the blade against her skin has lowered. "The names Pidge, and you are?"

"Why are you here? How did you make it out of the quarintine?" The man asks, eyebrows raised ever so slightly.

"I could ask you that same exact thing," she scoffs and he smirks slightly, clearly amused. "It's hard to get out something you're never put in."

"You... you never made it to quarantine? How?" The boy is surprised, and Pidge shakes her head.

"It's a long story." She smirks. "I don't share stories with strangers. Are you going to kill me? I have places to be. I hate waiting."

The knife is removed from her throat, and the boy slides the purple-ish blade into his belt loops (which look a little frayed).

"You have balls, Pidge." He says, and then sticks out his arm. Pidge takes it, and when she's on her feet he gives her hand a very formal shake. "I'm Keith."

"So I've been told," Keith's hand is firm and strong, and standing up he is taller than her, but it makes Pidge no less intimidating. "You didn't startle the horse?"

"You mean Red? She knows who I am. I live here, after all. She's my horse." Pidge looks at him, up and down this time, and if the dirty red flannel doesn't scream 'cowboy' then Pidge doesn't know what does.

Pidge laughs almost awkwardly. "Your a cowboy." She states, watching Red nuzzle against Keith's open hand.

"Are you labelling me?"

Pidge adjusts her very large glasses. "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing. You didn't kill me. Am I invited in your home, or are you keeping me in the barn?"

Keith pauses, staring at her for a moment as he runs his hands down Red's snout.

"The barn, for now." He says. "I know your name, but whose to say you won't kill me in my sleep? Take my supplies and run off?"

Pidge laughs. "Smart choice, considering you just gave me two very wonderful ideas."

"I sleep with my eyes open. Good luck with that, Pidge."

"Hah. I don't think I would need it."

"Are you challenging me? I could have killed you earlier."

He's right, he could have killed her. He could have slit her throat while she slept and then stabbed her in the brain when she turned and Pidge wouldn't of had a single idea of it. But... Keith hasn't. And that floored Pidge. He saved her, kept her alive when he didn't need to, and Pidge wondered if that was because of her attitude towards the situation.

She had acted like she didn't mind if she died, but in all honesty she minded. She needed to find Matt first. Needed to know if he was alive. If she died after that, then so be it. She needed answers. Pidge couldn't die before then.

"You could have. You didn't."

"I still could." Pidge raises and eyebrow, extended her own hand to pet the soft coat of Red. She shakes the comment off.

"Your looking for someone." Pidge declares, and Keith looks at her with an emotion in his eyes that she doesn't understand.

"How did you guess that?"

"Your alone here. That's why you didn't kill me. That's why you won't kill me now. Because I'm alive."

"Your ideas are... loosely interpreted, Pidge."

"Maybe so. Am I right? Your not searching for someone directly. Your searching for something alive."

Keith eyes widen at that, and he sighs before he speaks. "Yes. I guess you could say that. And you are, too."

"How did you know?"

"It takes one to know one." Pidge smirks at his words, and she realizes that she has found someone she can trust.

Pidge can trust Keith, and he's the first she's trusted since it started.

xx

Keith doesn't come back to the barn for hours. He leaves Pidge to her devices and takes Red out on a three hour long ride. When Keith returns, her puts Red back into the fence and leaves her, and doesn't give Pidge a second glance. Pidge spends an hour or two while the sun lowers with Red, petting the horse and watching her trot along in the acres of fence. When Pidge returns to the barn, there is a steaming hot plate of food sitting on the loft, carefully placed by Keith himself so that she would have to climb.

"Dick," she huffs, climbing up the ladder to grab the plate, which contains a heaping scoop of beans and rice, and a couple slices of apple. Pidge is hungry, and the meal is so much bigger than the rations she's been forced to survive off of for months, the dinner makes her feel fuller than she ever has.

Deep in her being, Pidge is thankful for Keith. Thankful that she has found someone who lives. Who breathes. Who has a soul and a being. Pidge felt a strange urge to settle down, realizing that she had finally found one of the things she was searching for, her mind and her body were telling her to settle down, get comfy, and take advantage of the fact.

"Silly me," she sighed. "I can't. Not yet. I can settle when I find Matt." Keith is human, yes, but Keith was in no way Matt and Pidge couldn't, wouldn't rest until she found him.

She finished her dinner and instantly fell asleep in the stale scent of the barn loft. She slept soundly.

She never had any plans, no, all she knew was that she had a mission - to find her brother.

She was a woman on a mission, and she was unstoppable.

xx

 _ **If you thought Lance was gonna be the first person Pidge ran into... oopsies. I'll spill it now - Pidge won't run into Lance for a loooooooong time. It's so slow burn im freezing. Enjoy.**_


End file.
